Wifi range extension through stone walls
 

This is a new topic to me, but the way I did it with the BT Home Hub 2.0 was to use a few Comtrend PG902 powerline adaptors I had, and use those to make a virtual ethernet cable between the Home Hub and an old wireless router. I turned DHCP off on the second router and made the SSID and the same password as the Home Hub which I had to change to WPA to match the old router. Now I can wander around without the wifi dropping out. Just one wifi network shows and one password, and the IP addresses are all allocated by the Home Hub. Now I just need my broadband connected!

I was quite pleased with an hour of fiddling about. Looks like another adaptor over in an outbuilding will also work to use as an office.

Hope this is useful. The main downside is that having the old router and a big powerline adaptor is less elegant than a nice little integrated wifi extender, but they aren't cheap and you'd need a powerline adapter at the router end too.

Any other tips/experiences?

I would have thought that sort of setup would cause some networking issues. If you roam onto a different AP, your client's MAC address would have moved ports on the switch? You might not notice?

I have never tried it like that before. What happens if you run a continuous ping to your router and then get the client to roam onto the other AP?

Anyway, how about looking at WDS? No powerline adapters are then required.

I'll play more with it, but the advice was in this month's computer shopper, and it was a way I never imagined would work. The two routers are on different widely spaced channels. The Home Hub shows a wifi device as wired when it is through the second router.

Maybe the continuous ping/streaming would cause problems when moving, but then so would dropping out of one network into another, and many devices are not so good at switching between networks of different names appropriately, but I suppose I'm making them channel hop. It seems more slick to do it this way, as generally I wouldn't stream whilst moving around, but just want good coverage.

WDS sounds interesting. Reading up on it. Sounds like it doesn't work with all routers?